Musings on life, IT and programming by Chris Weedall

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iOS

Having recently installed iOS 6, I thought I’d try the new navigation features. Ok Siri, “navigate home”. After a few seconds, the response was “I couldn’t find an address for Chris Weedall – home”.
Ok, first let’s check the basics – I’ve previously set up my home address with Siri, and this address is attached to my contact card, marked as home. Also if I go to Settings -> General -> Siri -> My Info, the correct contact card is selected.

The response from Siri “I couldn’t find an address” could mean one of two things:

There isn’t an address flagged as “home” for me – well there is one there

It can’t find my address on the map – lets test that then

When I try to navigate to my town the directions returned are to a place with the same name but in Somerset, some 230 miles away. So it can’t find my address. Lets go about this another way then:

Remove the “home” address entry from my contact card (or move it to another address slot)

Go to the Maps app, and stick a pin in the road outside my house (it needs to be in the road to resolve an address, minus a house number and full postcode)

Click on the dropped pin and select “Add to contacts”

Select “Add to existing contact” and pick my contact card

This is the important bit – go to Contacts and edit my contact card, setting the address type of this new address to “Home”

This works a treat. The only downside is that the address isn’t now a full postal address, but you could keep the full address as a second address on the contact card.

Whilst working on a program to automatically generate mazes, I realised that most of my spare time for this kind of thing is either when watching TV, or when I’m away from home, such as on the park and ride bus to and from work. As I was looking to solve the problem using JavaScript/HTML there is no compiler involved, so some kind of editor app for my phone would be ideal. Sure enough there are several in the App Store, I settled on Expresso HTML, well because it looks nice, has some useful shortcuts to characters such as “<", has a handy inbuilt browser to preview my efforts – oh and it's free.

Coding on the go is fairly tough going, the virtual keyboard obscures half of the screen and doesn’t allow tabs (double space indentation!), but it is easy to switch between preview and editor mode, and you can work on multiple files. Ideal for small projects and experimenting on the go – it was enough to get my maze generator finished and working, details of how I got on to follow in a future post. If it had an in-built FTP client it would be great for making for emergency corrections.

Whilst trying to update my daughter’s iPod 4 to iOS5 I had the following error:

An error occured while backing up this iPod(-5000). Would you like to continue to update this iPod?

Continuing will result in the loss of all contents on this iPod.

That doesn’t sound good… I then remembered that we have restrictions enabled on this iPod as my daughter is only 6 so no internet, app store, etc. I disabled restrictions and tried again and it has worked fine this time. The only other thing I did was close any open apps. I don’t know, perhaps turning the iPod off and on again would have had the same result, but this worked ok here.